The ability to manage references to papers is an extremely useful tool for academics. As I see it, the tools divide into two classes: one for managing references while writing, and the other for managing references (often your own) for bibliographic purposes such as putting together your CV. Tools such as EndNote and Mendeley are designed to manage a database of references that can be embedded in documents (such as MS Word) without the need to re-enter all the metadata. The tools work, but are brittle and prone to corrupting the manuscript.

Recently, a number of tools (often based on Google Scholar as the search/data mining engine) have been released. I reviewed CitationTracker earlier, and now got around to looking at Scholarometer.

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Just when you thought browser wars were a thing of the past, here comes Google Chrome. In a bid to increase its browser’s market penetration, Google announced Quick Scroll, a Chrome extension that enhances Google’s search results by highlighting matching passages that may not be easy to find otherwise.

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Which research result excited you the most in the past year? We’re not asking for the one you thought most important, or the one that would be most exciting to everyone, but which one got you, personally, most excited.

I’ll start things off with a result that delighted me so much I went around smiling all day, only feeling sad that more people couldn’t appreciate it! The result, that appeared in two papers almost simultaneously, is that some quantum states are too entangled to be able to compute one way. The result enchants me because it is surprising, fundamental, and related to topics close to my heart. Prior to these papers, the conventional wisdom held that more entanglement could only help quantum computation. It came as a complete surprise that it could hurt!  Dave Bacon writes beautifully and succinctly about these startling results in his viewpoint, published in Physics, about the two papers published together in Physics Review Letters 102 last May. Here I give an briefer account in order to explain why these result delighted me so much.

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